I'm currently reading a very good book about Asian history called "East Asia at the Center," by Warren Cohen. It covers the highlights of Asian history from 1000 BC until the late 90s. It gives a good perspective on the region that China is a major part of, which will help you understand some of the events it has been involved in.

Then I would get a general history of China, like Keay's China: A History.

From there, it really depends on what period catches your interest. I'm really interested in the modern period (after 1840), so I know titles like The Boxer Rebellion by Preston or the Hungry Ghosts by Becker. Jonathan Spence worked a lot on the Ming and Qing eras, and while I haven't read them, he's considered one of the best Chinese historians of recent memory.

China itself has presented so many faces to the world, and has such a rich and complex history and culture that digging into the literature about it is mostly about picking a place to start. Go to a library, start borrowing book that interest you. Read the bibliographies, find the titles in there that interest you. Repeat.

The Last Apprentice might fit the bill. Not much ghost-hunting in the first book, but there's elements of it, and the second book is a bit more ghost-centric (or at least so the synopsis will have me believe)

2. This is a difficult request. The majority of literary criticism published nowadays assumes you already have knowledge of X movements prior. My suggestion is to buy an anthology of literary criticism essays from different periods, but I have no idea how much you already know about lit. crit.

@Wicked: For a really basic book on literary criticism (like, stuff they make high school kids read) you could try How To Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas Foster. His tone is a bit annoying (like your 50-year-old uncle desperately trying to be "hip") but the content is a good, basic introduction to critical reading.

TV Tropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy